Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

Tag: climate change policy

The White House Council for Environmental Quality (CEQ) has released a draft of revised guidance that “describes how Federal departments and agencies should consider the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change” under reviews governed by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—an act which basically requires some sort of assessment as to the environmental impacts of all proposed federal actions.

Under the revised guidance, the CEQ makes it clear that they want federal agencies now to include the impact on climate change in their environmental assessments.

But here’s the kicker, the CEQ doesn’t want the climate change impacts to be described using measures of climate—like temperature, precipitation, storm intensity or frequency, etc.— but rather by using the measure of greenhouse gas emissions.

Basically, the CEQ guidance is a roadmap for how to circumvent the NEPA requirements.

Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

The Obama Administration this week is set to release the latest version of the National Climate Assessment—a report which is supposed to detail the potential impacts that climate change will have on the United States. The report overly focuses on the supposed negative impacts from climate change while largely dismissing or ignoring the positives from climate change.

The bias in the National Climate Assessment (NCA) towards pessimism (which we have previously detailed here) has implications throughout the federal regulatory process because the NCA is cited (either directly or indirectly) as a primary source for the science of climate change for justifying federal regulation aimed towards mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Since the NCA gets it wrong, so does everyone else.

A good example of this can be found in how climate change is effecting the human response during heat waves. The NCA foresees an increasing frequency and magnitude of heat waves leading to growing numbers of heat-related deaths. The leading science suggests just the opposite.

This Current Wisdom takes an in-depth look at how politics can masquerade as science.

“A pack of foma,” Bokonon said

Paraphrased from Cat’s Cradle (1963), Kurt Vonnegut

In his 1963 classic, Cat’s Cradle, iconic writer Kurt Vonnegut described the sleepy little Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, where the populace was mesmerized by the prophet Bokonon, who created his own religion and his own vocabulary. Bokonon communicated his religion through simple verses he called “calypsos.” “Foma” are half-truths that conveniently serve the religion, and the paraphrase above is an apt description of the Administration’s novel approach to determining the “social cost of carbon” (dioxide).

Because of a pack of withering criticism, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is now in the process of reviewing how the Obama Administration calculates and uses the social cost of carbon (SCC). We have filed a series of Comments with the OMB outlining what is wrong with the current SCC determination. Regular readers of this blog are familiar with some of the problems that we have identified, but our continuing analysis of the Administration’s SCC has yielded a few more nuggets.

We describe a particularly rich one here—that the government wants us to pay more today to offset a modest climate change experienced by a wealthy future society than to help alleviate a lot of climate change impacting a less well-off future world.

Hmmm. A pounding blizzard hits the Northeast, followed by an Arctic cold blast. All the while, Florida is set to oust New York and join California and Texas as the top 3 most populous states in the U.S.

Tomorrow [today] Rep. Henry A. Waxman and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, co-chairs of the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change, will host representatives from five of America’s major sports leagues, as well as the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC), to discuss the effects of climate change on sporting activities and the work these organizations are doing to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The group will meet for a closed-door discussion, followed by a press availability.

Now, admittedly, even as a climatologist, I do spend a fair amount of time discussing sports.

But I do so around the water cooler or at the local bar, not with Congressional task forces.

In his speech today, President Obama laid out his plan—formulated around executive action—to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in hopes of mitigating future climate change.

Funny thing is, absent his Climate Action Plan, the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have been on the decline for a decade, and now are at about the same level as our emissions in the early 1990s. In fact, the decline in emissions is taking place at a rate faster than the one sought by the president.

So why mess with a good thing? There is no way that introducing a bunch of new government regulations is going to improve the situation. If the Great Recession is any indication, the outcome of government involvement in the energy industry will be a poor one.

And to what end? As I have repeatedlyshown, reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions has no significant impact on the future course of climate change.

On top of that, new science is accumulating that indicates that the future course of climate change is likely to be less steep than our current climate model-based estimates.

And despite the president’s long list of supposed climate wrongs that are consistent with human-caused climate change, there is an equally long list of climate wrongs that have been averted for reasons “consistent with” climate change.

Taken together, declining U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and declining estimates of climate change, should have been enough to convince the president that things were already on the proper track—no government intervention necessary.

But this administration is characterized by intervening where it is not necessary. The president’s Climate Action Plan is more of the same.

Following the dubious example set recently by U.S. legislators, French politicians have informally proposed slapping punitive tariffs on goods from countries who refuse to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The German State Secretary for the Environment has, quite rightly, called foul:

There are two problems – the WTO (World Trade Organization), and the signal would be that this is a new form of eco-imperialism,” Machnig said.

”We are closing our markets for their products, and I don’t think this is a very helpful signal for the international negotiations.”

I have a paper forthcoming on the carbon tariff issue, but in the meantime here’s a recent op-ed (written jointly with Pat Michaels) on climate change policy mis-steps.